120th birthday of esperanto

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the
Web of Language:

"This year marks the 120th birthday of Esperanto, the universal  
language devised in 1887.  But there’s no reason to celebrate, so  
don’t buy a gift for the language that promises hope but never  
delivers.  Esperanto was a good idea.  It just didn’t work. . . .  
it’s not culture free, not apolitical, and it hasn’t made anything  
better. ... And rightly or wrongly, Esperanto was always viewed in  
terms of a political agenda.  Some Esperantists dreamed of founding  
their own state, with Esperanto the official language.  Russia’s  
tsars banned the language as a revolutionary threat, and in Japan  
before World War II, Esperantists were executed as communists.  But  
Stalin had speakers of Esperanto shot, or, when he was in a good  
mood, he sent them to Siberia.  Hitler considered Esperanto a tool of  
Jewish world domination (Zamenhof had been Jewish) and exterminated  
anyone who used it. ... having everybody speak the same language may  
be useful from an administrative point of view, but it has never been  
a recipe for peace and understanding.  Look at Ireland and Northern  
Ireland, or the two Koreas."

Read it all on the blog.

Best,

Dennis





Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage

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